How to use Google podcast

Google Podcasts is Google’s first take on a standalone app for podcasts, and it is integrated with both Google Assistant and Google Home. The free app is fairly minimalist, sporting an uncluttered interface and a handful of features, though the company already has more features the works.

Google Podcasts is not ready to compete with the plethora of third-party podcast apps for Android, but it has great potential. One of Google’s goals is to eventually use artificial intelligence to improve the listening experience, according to Lifewire.

How Google Podcasts works

The Google Podcasts home screen displays available podcasts sorted into categories, such as trending, comedy, news and politics, and business. Once you start subscribing and listening to podcasts, your home page changes to show more targeted recommendations based on your listening activity. Currently, there is no rating system or any way to rate podcasts.

From the home screen, tap any podcast to learn more and see recent episodes, then tap ‘subscribe’ if you like what you see. Some podcasts, such as those from National Public Radio, also have a ‘donate button’. Podcasts you are subscribed to are listed at the top of your home screen; below you can find podcasts with new episodes, podcasts you are currently listening to, and podcasts you are currently downloading. To unsubscribe from a podcast, go to the podcast’s page, tap subscribed, then tap unsubscribe on the pop-up asking if you are sure.

From the episode description page, you can also download the episode or mark it as played.

When you hit play, you will see a small module at the bottom of your screen with the podcast logo, episode name, and a pause or play button. Swipe up to see more controls for playback speed, rewinding 10 seconds, and forwarding 30 seconds; tap and move the playback slider left or right to fast-forward and rewind quickly.

There is also a button to change the playback speed from 0.5x to 2.0x, and 14 options in between and to trim silence from podcasts.

Google Podcasts features

The Google Podcasts app has several useful features, including downloading an episode for offline listening and syncing podcasts across devices so you can quickly resume an episode. Unfortunately, there is no web or desktop version yet.

Due to its integration with Google Assistant, you can also use voice commands to control the app; say something like “Play this American life” or “Listen to the latest episode of The Sporkful” to begin listening to those podcasts. Other commands include “next episode,” “pause,” and “what’s playing?”

If you are listening to a podcast while commuting and you have still got an episode to finish when you get home, you can transfer the audio to your Google Home. Just say “Hey Google, play this American life,” and it will respond before resuming the episode from where you left off.

Google is also working on a speech-to-text transcription tool to add closed captioning for those with hearing loss and aims to translate that into multiple languages.

Furthermore, since only about a quarter of podcasts at the top of the charts are hosted by women, and even fewer by people of colour, Google is also working with the podcast industry to pave the way for underrepresented voices, via the Google Podcasts creator program.

#Takeaway

Content scraping

Content scraping is an illegal way of stealing original content from a legitimate website and posting the stolen content to another site without the knowledge or permission of the content’s owner. Content scrapers often attempt to pass off stolen content as their own, and fail to provide attribution to the content’s owners.

According to Techopedia, content scraping can be accomplished via manual copy and paste, or may use more sophisticated techniques, such as using special software, HTTP programming or HTML or DOM parsers.

Much of the content that falls prey to scraping is copyrighted material; reposting it without the copyright owner’s permission is a punishable offence. However, scraper sites are hosted all over the world, and scrapers who are asked to remove copyrighted content may just switch the domains or disappear.

Content scrapers are able to drive traffic to their websites by scraping high-quality, keyword-dense content from other sites. Bloggers are particularly susceptible to this, probably because individual bloggers are unlikely to launch a legal attack against scrapers. Scrapers are encouraged to continue this practice because search engines have not yet found an effective way to filter out unique content from scraped content, allowing scrapers to continue to benefit.

Website administrators can protect themselves against scraping through simple measures, such as adding links to their own site within the content. This will at least allow them to get some traffic from scraped content. More sophisticated methods of dealing with scraping by bots include:

Commercial anti-bot applications

Catching bots with a honeypot and blocking their IP addresses

Blocking bots with JavaScript code

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